The Epic Saga of the Publishing of My Epic Saga.
Being a novice to the book publishing industry, I've decided to keep an online diary of the publishing and promotional process as it unfolds for my first novel. I'll talk about all the stuff I do, how well it works out (or how miserably it fails), what resources I use, and what (if anything) useful I learn along the way.

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Sixteen Spellbindingly Alphabetized Witches and Wizards

I’m going to upset someone with this list. Let’s
just get that out of the way right off the bat. Probably a bunch of someones. People
love them some witches and wizards, and if I know people (and I do know a
couple), they get pretty persnickety about which spellcasters they think are
the best, and why. First, there’s going to be some dispute over gender-specific
magic user titles (witch, enchantress, sorceress, etc.). Why can’t I just call
them all “wizards” and be done with it? Because some characters (Serafina
Pekkala, for example), are proud of the title “witch,” and would get mad if I
changed it. So boom. People are going to be mad right there. Couple that with
the fact that there are literally hundreds of witches, wizards, warlocks,
enchantresses, sorcerers and necromancers that show up in fantasy fiction while
I’m trying to hold my list down to just fifteen of them, and someone is going
to get their nose out of joint because their favorite got left off the list, or
didn’t take the top slot, or should have been referred to as a “necromancess”.

I won’t do anything about the gender-indicative
titles because that’s not my job. And I can’t really do anything about the too-many-magic-users
thing, because there are just too many magic users. But I can mitigate
the impression of slighting your favorite enchanter/ess by listing these fifteen
witches and wizards… ALPHABETICALLY! So, without further ado (wait! One further
bit of ado! There are a few spoilers on this list, although I’ve tried to keep
them to a minimum), here are Sixteen Spellbindingly Alphabetized Witches and Wizards:

1.Dallben—When we first
meet Dallben in The Book of Three by
Lloyd Alexander, he’s already 379 years old, so there’s that. I’m barely half a
century and I’m already getting creaky. Next, he’s one of those wizards who
hardly ever needs to use his power because he’s so bad ass that the bad guys
just steer clear of him. But when they do try to mess with him, he burns them
to the ground. In addition to being the mightiest enchanter in all of Prydain,
he’s also the keeper of the magical Book of Three, which has all the secrets of
the past, present and future in its pages. And finally, he’s both the protector
of Hen Wen, the oracular pig, and the foster parent of Taran, the main
character. All of these things make him pretty awesome, in my opinion.

2.Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden—So, I had to decide—H for Harry or D for Dresden? Most wizards are such rock stars that, like Madonna or Prince, they go
by a single name and everyone knows who they are. But not Harry. He’s got four
names. I decided to go with the system I learned in first grade—alphabetize
people by their last names. Harry is the star of Jim Butcher’s The Dresden
Files series, which is kind of a mashup between magic and hard-boiled
detective fiction. He’s not just a wizard, he’s also a private detective
working in Chicago. As far as magic goes, he’s a powerful elemental enchanter,
specializing in “Kaboom Magic” (battle magic) that involves earth, wind, fire,
water and ice spells (although he’s not above using a regular old shotgun in a
pinch). He also has a magical talking skull named Bob and a dog named Mouse who
is basically as smart as a human.

3.Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore—Dumbledore’s got five names. Count ‘em. Do I really need to
explain why Dumbledore’s on the list? Ok, fine. Let’s see. For starters, like
Dallben, he’s an old teacher (he was born in 1881, which makes him about 115
years old). We get introduced to him as the Head Master of Hogwarts school of
witchcraft and wizardry in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K.
Rowling, and then he runs the place and pretty much knows everything for six
more books. Apart from running the school of magic, he can pull memories
out of his brain (and other people’s) with his wand, he has a pet phoenix, he was
the winner of the greatest magical duel of all time in which he battled and
imprisoned the wizard equivalent of Hitler (Grindelwald), and when he looks in
a mirror that shows people their deepest, darkest desire, he sees himself
holding a pair of thick, woolen socks. Not really on that last one. He was
actually totally lying about that to Harry. Oh, and he’s the only gay wizard on
this list…that I’m aware of. While most people have heard that the word
Dumbledore is an antiquated word for bumblebee, apparently, it was also a style
of hat popular in London in the 1880’s and 90’s. Albus is Latin for “white,” so
that would make his name, “White Hat,” which is a sneaky way of saying, “the
good guy.”

4.Elphaba—So, I know.
She’s a wicked witch—no, THE wicked witch. But if there’s one thing I’ve
learned from reading Gregory Maguire’s Wicked,
it’s that there are two sides to every story and the winners usually make the
losers look like the bad guys. Elphaba is actually a bit of both, and a pretty
awesome witch to boot. First, she doesn’t like being called a witch. I don’t
think I would either. Second, she’s Ozian royalty. Third, she’s the
illegitimate daughter of the Wizard of Oz, and finally, she uses sorcery to
create the flying monkeys. Come on! That should get you on a list like this
even if you spend the rest of your career slacking.

5.Gandalf—Oh, come on!
Like Gandalf wasn’t going to be on this list! Of course he is. Gandalf isn’t
even a human. He’s a Maia, which is
basically an angel. That’s right. Gandalf is an angel incarnated in a basically
human form, sent down from Valinor to aid in the battle against Sauron. How old
is he? He was born before the world was created and he’s essentially immortal.
So…old. 2,000 plus, at least. What else? Well, when he’s not flapping around on
giant eagles, he rides around on the fastest horse that ever lived, (which he
can talk to), he owns one of the Three Elven Rings (Narya, the Ring of Fire), he
battles a Balrog, and he gets to shout that awesome line, “Fly, you fools!”
Then he gets killed and comes back to life. Oh, and he can make
fireworks and blow animated smoke rings from his weed pipe. There’s a bunch of
other stuff, but those are the basics.

6.Ged—Wait. So now I’m switching from advisor
wizards to protagonist wizards? Yes. I can do that. I don’t have to
write about Ogion, even though he’s an old wizard who teaches, because I like
Ged better and this is my list. We first meet Ged as an orphan child in A
Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin (the K stands for Kroeber, which isn’t some weird middle name; it’s her maiden name). And
right off the bat, he unleashes some major magic without even knowing what he’s
doing. That kind of turns out to be a theme for him, as he later unleashes a
viciously evil shadow monster into the world without really knowing what he’s
doing. But, he also does a bunch of other stuff, like mastering dragons and
travelling to the literal ends of the earth and finding the broken pieces of a
massively magical ring and being the only guy with any chance of closing evil
portals between the land of the dead and the land of the living. Oh, and he’s
the only wizard of color on this list—a fact that the SyFy channel totally
overlooked when they made their utterly crappy and very Caucasian mini-series,
Legends of Earthsea, based on the books.

7.Hermione Granger—Hold
it! Hold it! I already did a spell caster from the Harry Potter series! What do I think I’m up to? Well, I’m including
Hermione from Harry Potter and the Cursed
Child, and that’s not technically in the seven-book series. Plus, she’s
such an awesome witch that she actually becomes Minister of Magic. Plus, Harry
and Ron would never have survived without her. Plus, she got turned into a
human/cat hybrid for a couple of months. Alternately described as “the
brightest witch of her age” and “an insufferable know-it-all,” depending on who
you ask, she’s pretty much a genius. Plus, her parents are both dentists.

8.Harold Shea—Harold, the
“Incomplete Enchanter” Shea, is one of my favorite wizards. He’s really a
psychologist from the present day (well, present day 1940’s—which is when the
stories were written) who uses a system of symbolic logic to project himself
into alternative realities in which magic works. Unlike almost every other
wizard, Harold doesn’t have a teacher—he figures out how to do magic based on
things he’s read, educated guess-work and logic. Most of the time, he’s just
winging it and bumbling his way through his spells to create tales of
wonderfully screwball fantasy. Harold is basically just a brainy nerd—but
written before nerds were a thing. Do yourself a favor and check him out in the
Complete Enchanter series by L.
Sprague De Camp and Fletcher Pratt.

9.Sorceress Ivy—Princess
Ivy (that’s right, she’s going to be King of Xanth one day) is just three years
old when she stars in Piers Anthony’s seventh Xanth novel Dragon on a Pedestal and helps save the world from destruction. She
has a “magician level” talent—the magic of enhancement. She can enhance any
quality of a person or object—including unconsciously making them more like
what she thinks they are or should be like. She’s also the twin sister of Ida,
the Sorceress of the Idea, who can make any idea become a reality.

10.Marceline the Vampire Queen—Wait…I’m including characters from Adventure
Time on this list? Yes. Marceline Abadeer is not really a traditional magic
user, but everything about her is magical. While she’s a vampire, she doesn’t usually
suck blood—instead she eats the color red out of things. She is over a thousand
years old, can levitate, turn invisible, change into various beasts, absorb the
powers of other vampires and can play bass guitar. She also survived a nuclear
war. So there’s that.

11.Merlin—OK. This one
was another gimme. You can’t make a list of wizards and not put Merlin on it.
There’s a law. But let’s not do the normal Merlin stuff. Let’s focus on the
lesser known coolness. First, Merlin was based on a supposedly real guy named Myrddin
Wyllt, who is a legendary Welsh madman and prophet from around AD 573. He
started off as a bard, but went insane during a battle when he saw his entire
side of the fight wiped out. Geoffrey of Monmouth renamed him Merlin and
associated him with the Arthur legend. But apart from all the Arthur drama,
which I assume you know, Merlin is cool because he was apparently the offspring
of a king’s daughter and an Incubus. That’s right. His dad was a demon, which I
guess makes him a half demon. And he singlehandedly built Stonehenge. Yup. And,
he cast the magic spell that allowed Uther Pendragon to disguise himself as
Igraine’s husband and father Arthur. Which he did because his gift of prophecy
hipped him to the fact that making baby Arthur was a good idea. So, not bad for
an insane, Welsh bard.

12.Ninguable of the Seven Eyes and Sheelba of the Eyeless
Face—I’m totally cheating! I’m doing two for one here!
But it’s my list, so shut up. These two wizards are from the Lankhmar books by Fritz Leiber, and I’m
including them both in one entry because they are kind of the co-patrons of
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, even though they never really work together as
wizards. They’re both kind of creepy and ominous and not a lot is known about
them. Ningauble
has seven glowing eyes that float around inside his hood. He lives in various caverns.
Sheelba just has a black space in his hood and his house is a hut that scuttles
around on chicken leg-like posts—very similar to descriptions of the witch Baba
Yaga’s place. Both these guys are behind-the-scenes-style manipulators who send
Fafhrd and the Mouser on various quests. If you’ve never checked out the
Lankhmar books, you should, because they are great. And that’s not just my
opinion. You can look that up. That’s a fact.

13.Quentin Coldwater—Are you
paying attention? Yes, I just broke my alphabetizing rule and filed this one
under “Q”. Why? Because I didn’t want to start my list with Quentin. Why?
Because I wanted to start with Dallben, and it’s my list. Also, you have to
build your way up to Quentin Coldwater to properly appreciate him because the
character was clearly built on a scaffolding of all kinds of excellent wizards
and stories from the fantasy genre. Anyway, Quentin Coldwater is the hero of The Magicians trilogy by Lev Grossman.
Grossman said that he wanted to write a darker, more grown up version of Harry
Potter where the school of magic was more like what he’d experienced in school.
I think he succeeded. Quentin is a kind of depressed misfit who basically pulls
a Ged and accidentally unleashes a horrific beast by goofing around in magic
class. I love him as a wizard because he’s never particularly confident about
what he’s doing and because a lot of his magical adventures happen in a land
called Fillory, which is basically a dark and grown up version of Narnia.

14.Rincewind—Described as,
“the magical equivalent of the number zero,” is the most cowardly and
incompetent wizard on this list. That’s what makes him such an excellent
character. He seems to spend most of his time running away from various enemies
and transforming relatively minor problems into seriously major ones. He debuts
in The Color of Magic by Terry
Pratchett and is featured in a number of other Discworld books.While
Rincewind himself is not particularly fierce, he does have a very dangerous
piece of sentient luggage that follows him around everywhere, violently protects
him, and has an interior that is not constrained by its external dimensions.
Rincewind is also a failed student at the Unseen University for wizards on
Discworld.

15.Serafina Pekkala—Wait,
shouldn’t she be under “P” for Pekkala? Yes, she probably should, but I always
think of her as Serafina rather than as Pekkala. Now quit nagging me about the
alphabetization.Serafina is the gorgeous
witch Queen of basically Finland in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. She’s around three hundred years old
and likely to live to a thousand (witches live a long time in those books)
although she’s not exactly human. She can fly with the aid of a pine branch and
intervenes from time to time to save the day.

16.Tim the Enchanter—I had to turn it up to
eleven and end this list with Tim. He is my favorite wizard of all time and the
only one who is not from a book. Clearly, he specializes in pyrotechnical
magic, and he’s Welsh. Apart from that, and his enmity with the vicious, nasty Rabbit of Caerbannog, I can’t tell
you a whole lot about Tim except that I laugh every time I see him, no matter
how often that is. If you’ve never had the pleasure, check him out in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where
he is played by the incomparable John Cleese.

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About Me

Jim Hardison has worked as a writer, screen writer, animator and film director.
He has appeared on NBC's The Apprentice as an expert advisor on brand characters, developed characters and wrote the pilot episode for the PBS children's television series SeeMore's Playhouse and authored the graphic novel, The Helm, named one of 2010's top ten Great Graphic Novels for Teens by YALSA, a branch of the American Library Association. These days, Jim is the creative director and co-owner of Character LLC, a company that does story-analysis for brands and entertainment properties. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his lovely wife, two amazing kids, one smart dog and one stupid dog